


there's only one song, & adam and eve wrote it

by postcardmystery



Category: Rock Music RPF, The Rolling Stones
Genre: Drug Use, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-23
Updated: 2013-06-23
Packaged: 2017-12-15 20:24:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/853699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“If you’re Mick Jagger, why would you want to be anything else?” - Keith Richards</p><p>The status quo is chaos, and nothing has ever been better than this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's only one song, & adam and eve wrote it

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for drug use (and less of it than you'd expect, so), and some vague violence.

> I always feel sorry for Mick's women. They always end up crying on my shoulder and I tell them 'How do you think I feel? I'm stuck with him!'
> 
>   
>  \--Keith Richards

 

They're never quite sure what to call it, even to each other. Oh, they know what to call _each other_ , Keith’s not sure if he’s lived a day in his life since he met the bastard that he hasn’t called Mick a cunt; and Mick’s got a disturbing, entirely deliberate tendency to call him ‘darling’ when he wants one of their screaming, chair-throwing, kneecap-stomping fights that everyone they know has now accepted as part of the status quo. It should be odd, that part and parcel of the status quo is occasionally watching Mick spit blood onto a carpet that cost more than most cars, but it isn't, simply is. Somehow, everything just _is_. The status quo is chaos, and nothing has ever been better than this.

Keith lights another cigarette and watches Mick pull his boots up to his knees, knows with the slow inexorable pull of a certainty he’d always known without knowing he knew, that, well. That’s the fuckin’ drag, isn’t it.

Nothing is ever going to be.

 

 

“No,” says Keith, “Jesus, Mick. I’m not gettin’ on a stage with you in that. You look like a fuckin’ bauble.”

“Yeah,” says Mick, “Cos you look great in a suit. We should definitely keep doin’ that. Doesn’t make us look like pissed bank-managers in a bar we ain’t groovy enough for or anythin’.”

“Maybe I just don’t wanna have to look at your naked chest all night,” says Keith, “You ever think of that? Of course you fuckin’ didn’t, because the world revolves around Mick Jagger, I forgot.”

“Course you wanna look,” says Mick, and Keith manages to prevent his eyes falling out of his head when he rolls them, but only _just_.

“If you two are quite done flirting,” says Charlie, mildly, “We have a fuckin’ gig to play.”

Keith gets up and Mick raises an eyebrow, and Keith, knowing exactly what he’s doing, puts his hand on a slim hip, presses his index finger against Mick’s hipbone, leans in and whispers, “Put a fuckin’ shirt on, you mad cunt.”

Mick slides his hand down, tangling his fingers over Keith’s and Keith thinks he’s going to say something, another challenge, another _fuck me if you dare_ , but he just laughs, that high wild electric thing that Keith’s been following since the day he met him, and says, “You’re one to talk,” and leans down and sinks his teeth into where Keith’s ripped shirt bares his collarbone.

“ _You_ ,” says Keith, fisting his hair in Mick’s hair and bodily pulling him off like a misbehaving dog, “Are a piece of shit, Jagger.”

Mick grins. That’s kind of the beginning and the end of it, in a way. Mick grinning, and Keith never quite being able to bear to kick him hard enough to get him to stop.

“I don’t start things I can’t finish,” says Mick, which, okay, isn’t exactly true, from the university he left to run away and aim for the stars, to the people he’s fucked and left littered behind him like a very different sort of constellation, but it’s not exactly untrue, either, when it comes to them, but the thing is that they have so much time, so much to _live_ , so it’s no great sufferance when Keith cocks his head and says--

“Fuckin’ shut up and go get on stage, you fuckin’ ponce.”

And there, just as he knew it would be, is that _grin_.

 

 

He knows, later, that people will call this a blur, and he knows, too, that he won’t remember much of it, or only some of it, or almost all of it, it depends, he supposes, on who asks and how much he wants to admit in the face of however much of a tart Mick feels like being today, and he isn’t sorry, exactly, either. Because they’re paving something that was never there before, a road that no-one else has ever travelled but which many will follow after, he can already tell, even if he couldn’t tell you how. And the truth of it is that he fucked Mick for the first time years ago, when he met him the second time over, a hot spark of fate on a train and a Chuck Berry record in Mick’s hand, and Mick had smiled with a mouth that Keith is _sure_ he would’ve remembered and said, “So, you wanna get out of here?”

If Mick asked, he’d say it was the Chuck that did it, but he’d be lying and Mick would probably know it, the insufferable sod. That’s the problem about knowing someone well enough to write music with them so easily it’s like all you’re doing is sharing a cigarette: they see through all your shit. But he’d lie and pretend the slim hips that lurked beneath that (really really _really_ , Mick, what the fuck were you _thinking_ ) ugly suit had nothing to do with it. Mick’s got the whole world admitting that they want to fuck him, it’s almost his duty to hold out on him by now. 

He sat down next to him and told him that Jazz had changed his life, and Mick had grinned like a light-bulb coming on, like a flood-light, like a forest fire--

\--and that, as they say, were fuckin’ _that_.

 

 

“She’s like somethin’ from one of those novels,” Mick says, “One of those Russian ones. Jesus, Keith, I think she hates me.”

Marianne is so beautiful that even Keith can barely stop looking at her, and everything she says is brilliant, and yeah, she’s married, and yeah, maybe that ought to matter, but Mick’s so in love with her that he shoves Keith in the shoulder at three in the morning to wake him up and rambles, long and heartfelt, about the colour of her hair. He knows that it’s killing Mick, because everyone loves him, and it’s not even that, he’s become the poster-boy of a sexual revolution and everybody’s throwing themselves at him and all he wants is the girl who doesn’t want him-- and, if Keith is honest with himself, the boy who professes it enough, but never seems to make it come to pass. There are some similarities here that he doesn’t really like to think about, but Mick’s so addled over this girl he hasn’t noticed them yet-- which is fortunate, really, because Keith has a horrible suspicion that the one who’s going to have to bear the most abuse over this is him, once Mick’s realised he knew Mick’s pattern all along and never said a word, mostly because it was to his own advantage to not let on that he sees the echo of something in Marianne’s eyes that he recognises, which horrifies him. But Mick’ll work it out in the end, because he always does, and because he’s a tosser, albeit the tosser Keith can’t live with but can’t seem to live without.

“You’re just pissed off cos she doesn’t wanna fuck you and you can’t handle that,” says Keith, instead of many other options, and lights another cigarette, “And cos she keeps tellin’ you, and all.”

“Yeah,” says Mick, mock serious, “And _you’re_ supposed to be the only one who tells me how fuckin’ disgutin’ I am all the time. You and her, apparently. Christ.”

“You’re pathetic,” says Keith, and passes him the cigarette, “You’re also thick as shit. Why do you think she’s here all the time, man?”

“Oh, bloody hell, no, Jesus, you better not be tellin’ me what I think you’re tellin’ me, oh, _fuck_ \--” says Mick, sitting up so fast he knocks ash all over himself and hisses in a way that Keith is almost to ashamed to recognise from a lot of stuff they probably should never have done (but will do again, so maybe shame has no place here, after all) and then gets his hand much too close to Keith’s neck before he has a chance to stop him, “Did you _have_ to, man, come on, you ain’t fair!”

“Did I have to _what_ , what the fuck are you talkin’ about, Jesus, Mick--” says Keith, but it’s too late, Mick’s hand digging into the place where his neck meets his shoulder and his lips drawn back from his teeth in a snarl that has long heralded a good fuck or a terrible scrap in the past-- and on one, _very_ memorable occasion, both.

“Don’t we share enough already--” hisses Mick, (and it’ll be a few years before Keith can even _begin_ to parse that one) and mashes his hand against the side of Keith’s face and claws long marks down the side of Keith’s ribcage, all fight and wanton anger and shaking with it-- except he’s hard, pressed against Keith’s hipbone, and he doesn’t even give Keith time to react before his hand is gone and his mouth is there instead, pushing his tongue into Keith’s mouth and then pulling back to hiss incoherent vehement filth in Keith’s ear, one hand pinning Keith at his shoulder and the other struggling with this belt.

“I fuckin’ hate you,” he says, and shoves his hand inside Keith’s jeans, and Keith bites down so hard on his lip that he feels the skin tear, says, “Yeah, yeah, you cunt, I fuckin’ hate you, too.”

 

 

“If you’re quite done, what a tosser you are, _fuck_ , this t-shirt’s for the rag an’ bone man,” says Keith, several hours later, ripping the remnants of his shirt off and finally shoving off his jeans from where they’re tangled around his ankles, stretching back on the floor, back arching, pushing the heels of his hands into the carpet and relishing the pull of the leather cuffs around his wrists, knowing, maybe, that Mick can’t ever look away from it when he does it, carries on--“You could try shuttin’ up for once in your useless pissin’ life and listenin’ to me. Like as an experiment, maybe.”

“Maybe you oughta stop touchin’ my stuff,” says Mick, trailing a lazy hand down a chest covered in marks from Keith’s hands, his smirk wicked but a little anger still lurking in his eyes, and Keith only allows himself the brief indulgence of following the movement of Mick's hand with his eyes before asking, “Do you really not know, Mick?”

“Know _what_?” says Mick, and Keith sighs, takes pity on him, tells him.

 

 

She’s so, so brilliant, and she loves Anita instantly, beautiful Anita, oh-so-clever Anita, the woman who saved Keith’s live, or would’ve damned it, maybe, if that wasn’t a role in his life already filled by somebody else, those shoes too big for anyone else to fill. They go everywhere together and do everything together, and he means _everything_. Anita doesn’t care who he fucks, and it’s one of the things he loves most about her, how easy it is, that he fucks other people and she fucks other people and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t even enter into it at all. Except that he’s never been able to tell if she knows about Mick, and has never been able to bring himself to ask, the truth of that making him feel more naked than any other thing he’s ever known. 

So the first time Marianne pushes open his hotel room door and clambers into his lap, the sweetness of her French perfume tickling his nostrils and her hair brushing his neck, and says in that cut-glass accent of hers, “Can we borrow you, darling?”, and, worse, Mick’s behind her, leaning against the doorframe, the cock of those snakehips the one that he knows Keith can’t resist, that smirk on his lips, so, yeah, the first time that happens, Keith knows he should say no. _Knows_ it. Has never been more certain of anything in his life. (Except--)

“Yeah, love, of course,” is what comes out of his mouth, instead, somehow, and Marianne laughs and pulls off her dress over her head before he’s even had time to move.

“I rather thought you’d say that,” she says, Mick’s hyena laugh echoing in Keith’s ears, and after that he stops paying the pittance he’d been making at resisting, lets her push him down and ride him, (“I want him first,” she says, and Mick’s eyes widen, a tell he should know better than to have, and she laughs at knowing that she’s caught him), and she’s rough and makes it all sting a little and it’s so, _so_ good, her on top of him with Mick’s eyes on them, _him_ , and after that--

\--after that, it’s almost inevitable. Marianne tells Anita, and Anita wants to try it, tells him to slam Mick up against their bedroom door and make a show of it, goads Mick into fucking her up against a wall and they both laugh at Keith when he comes before either of them get anywhere near him, just from watching. Then it’s Anita with her mouth between Marianne’s legs, watching both of them pin Mick down and do whatever they want, Keith’s hands in Mick’s hair and nothing could ever be better than this, he thinks, except for how everything keeps getting better, how this rise seems to have no fall-- and later, much later, he’ll know better, but now? He just looks down to Mick’s smirk from between his thighs and can’t even begin to feel the earth becoming unstable beneath his feet.

 

 

“Do you think they know?” says Mick, on a quiet night when their girls have fallen asleep early, their hair tangled together on the pillow and London outside never quiet but as quiet as it gets.

Keith takes a sip from Mick’s whisky bottle, and meets his eyes, says, truthfully, “Know _what_ , man?”

And, in a sense, that answers it all.

 

 

Him and Mick, they’re storytellers, really. So, yeah, here’s a thing every great storyteller knows: all good things must end.

 

 

“It’s not goin’ to work,” says Mick, shoving Keith’s entire body over, shoving the sheets off him and wrapping a skinny calf around Keith’s even skinnier one, “I don’t think it was ever gonna work.”

“Yeah, love, hello to you, too, fuck right off, Jesus,” says Keith, trying to half-heartedly push Mick off him, because it’s five in the morning and Mick’s been away for months, off making a film about something of great artistic importance and integrity that Keith has internalised absolutely nothing about except for the fact that Mick’s character is a flaming bisexual, (and isn’t _that_ an irony), sighs, “Knew I should never have given ya a fuckin’ key.”

“You didn’t,” says Mick, his voice laced with amusement as he lets his head flop onto Keith’s shoulder, “I stole it.”

“Oh,” says Keith, reaching onto the nightstand for a cigarette, “It all becomes clear.”

“I fucked Anita again,” says Mick, and it’s almost guilty, because he must’ve done it when Keith wasn’t there, on set maybe, but Keith doesn’t care and he doesn’t get why Mick would think he cares. Because the sad fact of it is that he’d share everything he’s ever had with Mick, if he could, and despite the fact he can’t -- because he and Mick are two of a kind, and he knows it, made peace with it years ago, and it’s almost not fair, dragging a bird into that -- well, despite the fact that he can’t, it doesn’t make the urge any less strong. Mick can fuck all of his girlfriends, if they wanted it, and Mick did, too. It’s much the same as fucking Keith, at the end of the day, which is an even sadder fact, if an accepted one, by this point, but a sad one all the same.

“How’s your fag movie doin’?” he says, to have something to say, and Mick laughs quietly, rolls over to burrow even further into Keith’s side, says, “I’m gonna make you watch it, you know. As punishment for never fuckin’ listenin’ to a single thing I told you about it. In a cinema and everythin’. ’S’gonna be great. For me, I mean.”

“I have a feelin’ sayin’ this is a mistake,” says Keith, finally getting in a drag off his cigarette, “But am I watchin’ this poncy piece of shit because it’s terrible or because you’ve done something in it that’s gonna drive me fuckin’ barmy?”

“Not the first one,” says Mick, smugly, and Keith slumps back into the pillow, says, “Tell me you keep your fuckin’ clothes on, at least.”

“No promises,” says Mick, slipping his finger under the waist of Keith’s jeans and just, _just_ getting the skin of Keith’s hipbone with the tip of his finger, “I look smashin’ in it, sorry.”

“You’re gonna be the death of me,” says Keith, and, well, it’s not like it’s untrue.

It’s not, really, strictly, the truth, but it’s something very close to it, nevertheless. Mick’s the only person Keith’s never been able to say no to, even though he wants to, something close to nearly all of the bloody time. But he’s never known anybody the way he knows Mick, like it’s something so simple but so difficult, like how he feels when he picks up a guitar, like Mick’s a chord progression under his hands and the words in his mouth. He’s got him under his skin, and the worst part is that he’s never even tried to get him out. He’s watched Mick get bored for years, with girls and boys, with outfits and music and everything, everyone, and re-make himself anew. The one rule of Mick is that nothing ever lasts forever. Except, somehow, the way that Keith almost knows what Mick’s going to do before he even does it, and even though he’s never going to stop hating him for most of the frustrating shit he does, he’s never going to stop loving him despite it, either. Keith didn’t really know relationships like this existed. He doesn’t even know if relationships like this have a _name_.

“So you and Marianne are done, then,” says Keith, and it’s not a question. Mick gets bored, he always gets bored, and Keith knows him better than anyone. It was only a matter of time.

“’Spose, eventually, when I tell her or whatever,” says Mick, distantly, his face twisting into the tell-tale expression that says his mind is already moving onto new things, and yeah, there you go.

“All these girls, and you’re the only one I seem to be able to fuckin’ keep,” says Mick, and Keith snorts, says, “Well, gimme me long-threatened marchin’ orders, then.”

“Really fuckin’ want to,” says Mick, looping his finger around Keith’s belt and tugging, uselessly, and Keith knows it’s just because he knows that him doing that always pisses Keith off, which says it all, really.

“Yeah, well,” says Keith, and Mick snatches the cigarette from his hand and exhales smoke right in Keith’s face, echoes, “Yeah, maaaaaaan. _Well_.”

 

 

“Brian’s dead,” says Mick, and, yeah. That’s a rough few months.

 

 

But they keep writing, because it’s all they know how to do. They keep writing and Keith keeps playing and Mick keeps making audiences eat out of the palm of his hand. They doss around for a bit and then they don’t, sometimes they’re high and sometimes they’re just _high_ , because nothing is ever more honest than their oft-repeated motto that they only ever tell each other, that the greatest drug ever invented is rock and roll. They play and they don’t, they fuck and they don’t, they fight and-- well, no. They always fight. That’s a given. They do their thing, and somehow Keith’s in a bar in New York with Mick’s bony elbows digging into his ribcage no matter how many times he asks -- “Fuck _off_ , man,” -- him to stop, here to see a kid with a stupid name that Mick just won’t shut up about, and Keith stopped paying attention to anything coming out of Mick’s mouth at least three hours ago. 

But.

“What is even fuckin’ happenin’ right now,” says Keith, because he saw Loud Reed at the bar and he’s pretty sure he saw the flash of a face that could only be Iggy’s waiting in the wings. Who the fuck is this kid, that he’s got Mick’s knickers in a twist like this and some of the only men Keiths’s ever known to come close to equal his singer (not that Keith’s ever going to admit that to Mick, obviously) hanging around in the dark, waiting for what could be almost anything.

Then the lights come up, and the most attractive man Keith has ever seen in his life drops to his knees and plays his guitarist’s strings with his fuckin’ _mouth_.

So, yeah. David Bowie happens to Keith the way David Bowie happens to basically everybody who’s ever lived, and Mick disappears the moment the kid leaves the stage, and mostly all Keith can manage to scrape together is a vague disappointment that he didn’t take Keith with him.

“Buy you a drink?” asks a voice over his shoulder, and he turns to the smudged eyeliner and unmistakable leer of Lou Reed.

“Only if it’s at your place,” he says, and so, okay, that wasn’t the smirk he’d wanted in his bed tonight, but yeah. It’d do.

 

 

“I wanna nick that thing he did to the guitar,” says Mick, crumpled and his hair a disaster and crawling into bed with Keith a few hours later, and Keith elbows him in the stomach just for even _thinking_ about assaulting his girl Dice with anything so pedestrian as his _tongue_.

“How was your space alien?” he says, over the muffled grumbling of Mick rubbing at his stomach, and Mick breaks off from whining to say, “Only if you tell me how Lou’s been gettin’ on.”

“Maybe he was better than you,” Keith says, and Mick laughs, says, “Dangerous ground, man. Maybe Davey-boy was better than _you_.”

“Hope you didn’t call him that to his face,” says Keith, and Mick grins, says, “So what if I did? Wanna fuck or not?”

“Maybe I don’t wanna be that freak’s sloppy seconds,” says Keith, and Mick leans in, “But I’ll tell you all about how he’s all porcelain like that _all over_. Come on, you know you want to.”

“Fuck you,” says Keith, which, translation: ‘yes’, ‘yeah’, ‘okay’, ‘hurry the fuck up, you tosspot’.

 

 

So time marches on, because they have so much time, even when it’s slipping through their fingers, and Ronnie happens, and keeps happening, with a few wobbles along the way, and things with Anita fall apart, but in a good-natured tumble that doesn’t hurt as much as Keith thought it would. They’re always somewhere, in a vague sort of way that he keeps on describing as ‘somehow’, and it shouldn’t be a surprise when he runs into Bowie in West Berlin, except, somehow, it is.

“How’s your singer,” says Bowie, and Keith’s not really sure if that’s supposed to be a question, in the same way that’s never really been sure of anything around this guy-- and it isn’t that he isn’t nice, exactly, (although, really, he’s _not_ , that’s much too simple a word and Keith knows it), it’s just that there’s so much magnetism there that taking in anything he says is almost impossible, (in the same way Mick must do that to everyone else, he guesses, seeing as how he’ll never know himself), so he nods, says, “Yeah. At the hotel. Asleep cos he’s a lazy arse, as usual. How’re you?”

“Oh, I live here now,” says Bowie, with a shy smile, the one that would have made it so difficult to dislike him, if anyone disliking him were ever a problem he’d been likely to have, “I like it. It’s different. I can do things. Iggy’s here. I brought him with me, I mean. We’ve been working on some stuff. He’s amazing. It’s amazing here, really.”

“That’s great, man,” says Keith, vaguely, wondering what the fuck _I brought him with me_ means and if there’s even any point in asking. So, instead, as what he hopes is a safer option, he asks, “What’s your new name this time, then?”

That, bafflingly, makes Bowie smile like Keith’s never seen him, and say, “There isn’t one. Now I’m just me. It’s lovely.”

“Yeah,” says Keith, “Er, okay.”

Bowie’s eyes go dark and knowing and really, _really_ clever, and it’s not that he isn’t clever all of the time, it’s just that he’s better at pretending to be something that he isn’t than anyone Keith’s ever met. But because he himself is much, much cleverer than most people ever even notice, he also knows that it’s because it’s in service of something, that smoke and mirrors game, in the same way that he also knows that he’s definitely never going to be clever enough to know what that something _is_.

“You can ask, you know,” says Bowie, and although he’s not smiling his eyes say that he’s laughing now, somewhere deep down inside, “About me and Iggy.”

“Nah, man,” says Keith, “You’re okay, thanks.”

“That’s honestly quite refreshing, really,” says Bowie, “Well, I must be off. Tell Mick I’ve still got his belt, would you?”

“Yeah,” says Keith, pulling his jacket around himself as rain starts to blur in the air between them, “Long as you know he probably won’t remember.”

“Oh, he’ll remember,” says Bowie, and Keith thinks about that moment for years afterwards, but eventually decides that he’s never going to be entirely sure whether or not Bowie winked.

 

 

“I’d say somethin’,” says Keith, laying it bare because, fuck, why not, they’re rock and roll but they’re getting _old_ , man, “If I felt like anythin’ needed sayin’.”

“I’m the only one you ever let touch your guitar,” says Mick, sprawled with easy possessiveness in Keith’s bed, not even looking up from _Heart of a Dog_ , tone all sharp and blank like Keith’s a complete fuckin’ idiot, and--

\--and, yeah, he’s got a point. Some things, after enough years, you’ve kind of said already.


End file.
